12/7/96

The First Day of Summer Break

Anything she can do, I can do too.

    "Daddy, get up!"
    "Shh, he's sleeping."   
    "No he's not. He's faking it."
    "I am not."
    I opened an eye. They were hovering over me, three of them. They looked vaguely familiar.
    "C'mon, Daddy, get out of bed. We want breakfast, and Mommy's run away, and --"
    "What?!"
    "Yeah, she said this summer it's your turn."
    Egads, the first day of summer break! And me, a single parent all of a sudden.
    I suggested we play house. "I'll be the Daddy," I said, sinking back into my pillow. "Who wants to be the Mommy and make everyone breakfast?"
    The girls were aghast. So was my wife, who came home not three minutes after fleeing, apparently because she'd already run out of money.
    "Up, pig!" she commanded. I upped. She got into bed. "Your life has just changed," she informed me. "You're in charge now. Of the four of us."
    At that moment I had a not entirely irrelevant thought: centuries ago when life expectancy was something like 36, a mid-life crisis was what we now call adolescence.
    So I figure, I'll play along with the charade; it can't last. I'll make the breakfast. She'll have made her point, take pity on me, and let me complete my sleep cycle. On the other hand, I'll have made my point. That I, uh ... that I know which side of the toast the butter goes on. Yeah, I'll show her.
    "Whatcha doing, Daddy?"
    "Making toast," I growled, stating the obvious.
    "In the microwave?"
    Whoa, there. Was I being challenged by a five-year-old? "Hey, this is the labor-free '90s. If it can't be nuked, it don't get cooked. And anyway, no one has toasters anymore. They're extinct, thanks to microwaves."
    The child introduced me to our toaster, which I'd always assumed was an art-deco vase. Without a flower in it, who can tell?
     The upshot was, nobody ate the breakfast I slaved over a hot microwave oven to make. "They're not hungry," I called to my wife with glib satisfaction.
    She came to investigate. "Where'd you get the bread from?"
    I sensed my intelligence was about to be insulted. "The freezer, of course."
    "We don't keep bread in the freezer."
    "Oh, yeah? Then what do you call this?"
    "Halibut."

SHE FED the children and resumed her summer vacation by going right back to bed. It seems I was still in charge. "What do I do now?" I asked chalantly, my confidence unsettled.
    "Figure it out," she said, and fell into a deep sleep.
    They were in pajamas so it was obviously time for bed. The end of a long day.
    "But Daddy, we just woke up."
    One of them took pity on me. "Maybe we should get Mommy."
    Nothing doing, I told them. "Whatever she can do, I can too. Unless you're still breastfeeding." They said they weren't. "Good, then. I can handle this. Now: what usually happens this time of day?"
    "We play, Mommy runs all over the place doing housework, you sleep, then we get dressed and go to gan and then we come back from gan and if you're still sleeping we're supposed to play outside but not to talk to strangers and not scrape gum off the sidewalks and --"
    "I get the idea. So let's get dressed for gan."
    "Gan's finished."
    I glanced at my watch. "Till when?"
    "Forever. Unless you have more children and they grow up and go to gan too. But that could take years."
    Dressing them was no problem. They all wanted to wear frilly pink party dresses, and we had just enough of them to go around, and I wasn't about to say no. The girls couldn't believe their luck. "Boy, in a million years Mommy wouldn't let us wear this. Daddy, you're terrific!"
    The summer was moving along apace -- I even managed to read the paper (well, actually, just the headlines, or most of them) -- when I hit a snag.
    "Daddy?"
    "Mm?"
    "What's sex, who's God, I don't want to die and why do your feet smell?"
    "Dunno. Ask your mother."
    "But she's sleeping and we have to know right now."
    Right then, I had to vacuum. I suddenly understood why I spent every day of my inquisitive childhood always waiting for my mother to finish vacuuming. It only now dawned on me that dust was but an excuse.
    I estimated how long it would take for the kid to forget her questions, tacked on 10 percent just to be sure, then turned off the vacuum, no sooner done than...
    "Daddy, we're bored."
    "So go to the bathroom. There's lots to do there."
    They filled me in on a little secret: there are 96 five-year-olds on our city block, with a strict rotational visiting system and if I messed it up our names would be Mudd. It sounded to me suspiciously like an illegal pyramidal chain letter. ("Send your kid to the address at the top of this list and if no one breaks the chain you'll get in return 46,820 children by lunchtime!")
    I consulted Shuli next door. Turns out she's the executive general-manager of the list.
    "Your Donna is supposed to be at Sarit today, Odelia is going to Mirit and Vardit is coming to play with your Nomi, but Vardit only speaks Russian and she's allergic to everything so if she starts to wheeze call a doctor. Yehudit wants to watch Pocahontas today but she's scheduled to play house at Florit's but she cried all morning so it was agreed they'd both be by you because you have the videotape. Hagit's coming by to pick up her Barbie -- it's the one-armed one -- on her way to Galit, but if she stays awhile keep her away from Yehudit because they always scratch each other. Shimrit steals, which is why nobody but your wife will have her over. Orit's mother is having an affair with Idit's father, so neither one can have Shulamit over because her mother is such a yente, so all three are coming to you and sleeping over, but don't worry, Orit's just about finished with the pox, nasty case she's had, poor thing. I'm sure your wife's filled you in on all their eating preferences. Oh, and one more thing, I do yoga between 1 and 5, so keep 'em inside and keep 'em quiet."
    "Thanks," I said.
    I had an inspired thought. I called Egged. "Send round a bus. One of those articulated double-deckers. Where to? I don't know -- give 'em a tour of the city, show 'em the desert, take 'em down the coast to South Africa. Just make sure you have 'em back by autumn."